ABSTRACT
Inspired by Peter Franklin’s reading of Schreker’s Der Schmied von Gent (‘The Blacksmith of Ghent’, 1932), this chapter focuses on another forgotten last opera, Hans Pfitzner’s Das Herz (‘The Heart’, 1931). Like Der Schmied, this is very much a late-Weimar work, the product of what Franklin calls ‘the politics of late-Romantic passion’. Its fairy-tale aspects tend towards a straightforward reading that, for numerous commentators, recall Pfitzner’s famed ‘artist-opera’ Palestrina (1917): a Baroque doctor (Daniel Athanasius) dabbles in the arcane in order to save the life of a young Prince; he is punished, imprisoned, repents, and is redeemed by God.
Yet, as this chapter proposes, Athanasius is no Palestrina. On the contrary: for all he is marked as a representative of the great tradition, he is simultaneously a meddling outsider and a feckless experimenter. He learns not to dice with demons; but also that an anonymous heart stolen from the identity-less masses is as valuable as that of a Prince. State-decreed power is as nothing, the opera teaches, to the moral bonds of a united Volk. In other words, Pfitzner and his librettist, the popular author Hans Mahner-Mons, here attempt a contribution to the Weimar discourse of a German Volksoper. As Pfitzner was to learn, nonetheless, his Romantic passion for the Volk would remain unrequited. Dismissed by the opera’s first conductors, Knappertsbusch and Furtwängler, the theatrical establishment, and ultimately the public, Pfitzner again became the German outsider, a pattern that, as several late polemics show, was to repeat itself even after the regime change of 1933.
